Pakistan

We spoke to an official, who worked for WAPDA in Lahore, Pakistan, and was directly involved in water treatment. This discussion highlighted the importance of a centralised water treatment system, and the need for governance over the 'standard' level of water cleanliness. Pakistan is currently moving towards this goal, and aims to have standardised water treatment soon, however as of right now, it is often up to each local district to lay out the rules on water treatment and the budget that is allocated to this.

Survey

Before we launched our project, we conducted an online survey to gauge the public’s reaction towards the problem of water safety and to see if our project would create an impact on society. We received a total of 118 responses with survey respondents coming from all around the world such as United Kingdom, Malaysia, Singapore and India.

The survey results showed that our project has the ability to make an impact as many people (68.6%) were aware of the dangers of oestrogen in water to animals.

Although our project would involved placing anti-bacterial resistance into water, our initial fears were alleviated when the survey results show that close to half of the respondents (40.7%) approved to the addition of bacteria in water while only 14.4% of them disapproved.

Overall, many felt that our team’s project have the ability to create a positive impact on the environment as there is a clear awareness of the present dangers of water.

Lee Hishamuddin Allen & Gledhill (IP Lawyer)

After some discussion with Eunice Chan, an Intellectual Property (IP) lawyer , we were told that in order to patent a product, it needs to be new or be combined in a new way. Patents cannot be applied if they have been introduced into the public domain. This prompted us to compile an intellectual property guidebook which would serve as a guide for other teams when considering which type of trademark applications they should go for.
Furthermore, in line with the recent blockchain developments, we posed the question of whether is blockchain technology the future of synthetic biology intellectual property protection. The full version of the guidebook can be found here.

David Coleman, Professor of Oral & Applied Microbiology, Dental Science at Trinity College Dublin

We were fortunate to conduct a phone call interview with Mr Coleman about his perspective on our Legionella project. He stated that decontamination against Legionella bacteria was far easier than effectively testing for the bacteria itself - most Legionella are highly susceptible to antibiotics. A rapid test would be valuable to dental practitioners to prove that their equipment would be sterile at low concentrations of Legionella bacteria. Equipment is usually sterile, however Legionella bacteria tend to find their way into dental chair units - waterlines can become dense with bacterial biofilm without regular disinfection.

Culture tests for Legionella can frequently result in false negatives, putting patients at risk when no threat can be identified. Legionella are a parasitic bacteria, both to humans and to microorganisms; they can revive themselves after being engulfed by amoeba, meaning that the amoeba cells must be lysed in order to correctly define the true prevalence of legionella in a given sample. An acid lysis step is required in order to free the Legionella, but due to the parasitic nature of the bacteria, cultures can still prove difficult to give consistent results. Disinfectant can also cause Legionella to enter a pathogenically-viable non-culturable state.

After the interview with David Coleman, we discovered a significant demand for an effective Legionella detection kit. We changed the sequence of our gRNA based upon his recommendation from an endA (highlighted in red) sensing device to a Legiolysin sensing device (highlighted in blue). The interview with David Coleman has had a foundational impact on our project, changing it at a genetic, and therefore functional level.



Before



After

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Dr Ng Khuen Yen, Professor of Pharmacy at Monash University Malaysia

In our interview with Dr Ng from Monash University, he offered us great perspective on his thoughts regarding to our Bacillus Subtilis project. He stressed that in order for us to market our product effectively, we have to ensure that the lead floatation system is low in cost and has good sensitivity towards the detection of toxic metals.

David Lloyd, FREDsense

Mr Lloyd, co-founder and CEO of FREDsense gave us amazing insights into how we could improve and advance our project, specifically in the North America market, He spoke of how lead is a pretty common problem in ageing infrastructure, especially in areas such as Michigan whereby a high concentration of lead is currently leaking out of the pipes of various infrastructures. Hence, our project has a great potential marketability value. With regards to scaling-up, he advised us that we need to consider whether do we want our project to be a field-based technology or something that can be implemented in common household. With the former option, he also warned us that we need to ensure that the operators using it would be able to know how to use them in a simple but effective manner. This is because they are used to using simpler and quicker operation lead detection systems such as taking water samples. Therefore, in order for our project to work effectively when launched, simplicity and performance are two things we have to bear in mind.